A response to Rafal Smigrodzki, Part 1On Friday, December 21, 2001 3:33
PM Smigrodzki, Rafal SmigrodzkiR@MSX.UPMC.EDU wrote:
> I don't disagree here, but there are two problems. One is that both
> the public and the government's attention will turn elsewhere. In
> other words, a program, such as Social Security, will be put in
> place to solve a seeming problem, then basically forgotten about.
>
> Yes, you are right, governement action tends to generate special
> interests which parasitize the society. This has been extensively
> analyzed by Jonathan Rauch in his "Demosclerosis".
I haven't read that book yet. The title suggests that this would only
happen under democracy. I submit -- in agreement with Hoppe -- it
happens under all forms of government, though some forms, on average,
grow slower than others. Democracy -- and I include republics under
this term here; the distinction between them is irrelevant here -- tends
to grow faster, IMHO, because there is more room for special interest
actions and for forming broad coalitions. Also, the beneficiaries of
government actions tend to change rapidly under democracies -- making
lots of people support policies they probably wouldn't under monarchy --
and the class distinction between the governing and the governed tends
to get blurred -- at different times, an individual may be part of a
ruling majority or a ruled minority. (Generally, in monarchies, it's
easy to see who's part of ruling class and who is not.)
> Yet, it is not an argument against the government as such,
> merely an argument against the government in its present form.
Not actually. I submit that institutionalized coercive actions -- the
defining element of government -- externalize costs in a way that almost
makes it much more likely for government to grow at the expense of
society as well as for programs to grow in no relation to their actual
benefits.
Also, unless you've solved the economic calculation problem of
socialism, then governments also face an information problem which they
can't overcome. (See Ludwig von Mises' _Socialism_ and Sanford Ikeda's
_Dynamics of the Mixed Economy_ for more on this.) This applies to
mixed economies as well. To the degree people cannot choose and cannot
own property, economic calculation becomes pointless.
> So, no incontrovertible moral argument against coercive action yet.
My argument is basically this. Reason and force in society are
opposites. If you use force, then you subjugate reason. The coupling
between the two might not be tight, but, in the long run, this hurts
society in generaly as well as specific individuals in the short and
long runs.
>> Then why coercion? In my mind, force and reason are pretty
>> much opposites. (The Objectivist influence on me.:) Ergo,
>> any initiation of force means foregoing the use of reason.
>> Would you, e.g., give up the scientific method or the laws of
>> logic because you couldn't get the results you desired in a
>> specific experiment or argument?
>
> "Initiation of force" is such a fluid concept.
I don't think so. It's pretty clear in most situations what it means.
There may be borderline cases, but these are typically solved through
examining matters more closely AND do not bring social interaction to a
grinding halt. For example, if I get the door of a restaurant, say, at
the same time as someone else, we don't shoot it out to see who gets to
go in first.:)
> I do believe that initially non-coercive systems spontaneously
> generate coercive situations, and then brute force is needed
> to prevent it from getting worse.
I know you believe this. That is how this discussion arose.
I would admit that in cases where coercion arises, one can and often
must use retaliatory coercion, but this is hardly what you mean. Also,
it doesn't even go outside of libertarian thought. For instance, crime,
such as theft or assault is obviously coercive. However, do we need a
government -- i.e., a legal monopoly on the use of force -- to retaliate
against or prevent crime? Hardly.
I also don't think this is what you have in mind. Your scenario of an
agrarian planet that evolves from a free market to an strict oligarchy
is something entirely different, BUT it involves the upper classes
basically taking over an existing government. I.e., you've already made
a monopoly on the use of legal force, so anyone or group who wants power
over society -- for whatever reason, e.g., self-defense, social
engineering, pure powerlust... -- only has to capture that institution.
This doesn't mean that anarchocapitalism or variants of libertarian
anarchism will never evolve into states. Obviously, the times/places in
history that have approached pure free markets in economics and politics
(e.g., the American West, Ancient Iceland, and so forth) eventually
evolved into societies with governments. However, the process takes
longer. I also believe we can learn from these examples to create
better institutions -- not perfect ones, but ones that can makes statism
much less likely than in the past.
>> I see the causality going the other way: there could be no government
>> or no government over and above simple chiefs temporarily ruling
>> small bands without civilization. Civilization, as it progresses,
>> creates huge amounts of wealth and capital that governments can
>> live off. Governments basically consume. You should read Hoppe
>> and others on this.
>
> Emphatically no. Read your Ayn Rand.
She's not mine.:) Also, I find her arguments in this area (and in
others) too abstract and often stacked to be of much use. It seems to
me she lays out a good foundation for anarchism, then she backs away
from it because she wants limited government. No doubt, some of this is
due to her times and to her experience in the Soviet Union. This
doesn't completely throw out her arguments against anarchism, but they
are sophomoric. (Her main one being that anarchism = choas. Her more
specialized critique of anarchocapitalism is that she believe competing
protection agencies would violently battle it out whenever they
disagreed on who coerced whom.)
BTW, many Objectivists are anarchists, such as Larry Sechrest. (Do a
web search on him.:)
> Governments (starting at the village chief level) are an unavoidable
> element in the development of civilization, emerging spontaneously,
> like eusociality, or herd behaviors, allowing coordinated activities
> and expanding the abilities of the society as a whole. I sincerely
> doubt you could give me an example of an ungoverned society
> achieving anything significant, especially survival among governed
> ones.
This is a point of contention and merely asserting what you believe does
not prove it. In fact, spontaneous orders evolve all around us. Even
before there can be a government, there has to be a huge degree of
coordination. For instance, if you could harldy predict what your
neighbor would normally do and this applied generally to society, there
could be no government. All these coordinations -- from languages to
calendars to other tacit agreements -- have to exist before people can
have anything else saddled atop them. (Of course, once you have some
coordination, more coordination most likely will follow, which is
something we in the growth of markets and cultures.)
> As much as I loved reading "The peace war", I do not believe it
> could come true, definitely not without technical advances absent
> from human history so far.
I don't Vinge intended it to be read that way either. His short story
"The Ungoverned" and his commentary on it leads me to believe he think
anarchocapitalism is a very delicate situation likely to turn into
statism when the first social crisis hits. I disagree here, but I do
think anarchocapitalism, in order to work, would have to be
thoroughgoing and not halfbaked. You can't have things like centralized
government control in one area and none in another. The control will
always create crises or instill the notion in some or even many people
than control is the solution when any little thing goes wrong. (You
know, how when rich people lose their multimillion dollar homes in mud
slides, then lobby for the government to pay for them because their
insurance policies didn't cover such loses -- as happened many years ago
in California.)
Also, since Vinge wrote _The Peace War_, a lot of work has been done in
the field of libertarian anarchism. The number of books examining the
topic has mushroomed and historical and theoretical research has
advanced significantly. Just to mention one, Bruce L. Benson's 1990
book _Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State_ relies on a lot of
recent (for 1990:) research that just wasn't around in the 1960s and
1970s when Rothbard and a few others were already make the case for
anarchocapitalism. Even Hoppe's model of anarchocapitalism and his
praxeological analysis of government, though he relies on a lot of
scholarship from the 19th and early 20th century, is something very
new -- with a long gestation period from the mid-1980s.
What I'm trying to get across here is the theory is advancing as it
embraces more criticisms and evidence.
>> I'm not unwilling to change my morality, but it would take evidence
>> and argument -- not some vacuous claim about being openminded,
>> but real, hard data.
>
> Very good - this is exactly what I think and I am glad you do not take
> a dogmatic position on the main question that I posed.
I don't think anyone on this list would admit to taking a dogmatic
position. Dogmatism is always a label attached to the other person's
views.:)
Happy Holidays!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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